Splunk Cloud Platform

SSE-C without KMS

ajac
New Member

Hello,

i currently evaluating SmartStore encryption options and noticed that SSE-C in combination with AWS KMS is mentioned in the documentation.

Could someone please clarify the following:

  1. Why does SmartStore SSE-C use AWS KMS, given that SSE-C typically relies on customer-provided keys that are sent with each request?

  2. Is it possible to configure SmartStore encryption to use our own customer-managed key (fully provided and stored by us) instead of an AWS KMS-managed key?

My goal is to maintain full control over the encryption keys while still benefiting from SmartStore’s server-side encryption capabilities.

Thank you in advance for your clarification.

Kind regards!

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livehybrid
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

Hi @ajac 

My understanding is that SmartStore implements SSE‑C by generating a per‑object data‑encryption key (DEK) using the customer‑managed CMK. The Smartstore service never stores the plaintext key; the key is only supplied by the client on each read/write request, encrypted by KMS, this protection model is same as SSE‑C (the client controls the keys), but the actual key payload is managed by KMS.

Customer Managed Keys (CMK) is available in Splunk Cloud AWS / Google Cloud environments but not Azure (see https://help.splunk.com/en/splunk-cloud-platform/get-started/service-terms-and-policies/10.0.2503/in...

Check out the https://help.splunk.com/en/splunk-cloud-platform/administer/manage-users-and-security/9.3.2408/manag... EMEK page for more information on this but to answer your question, yes, you can manage the key yourself and share access to it through AWS IAM Policies so that Splunk Cloud can consume it. 

Its worth discussing this with your Splunk account team if you need further lower level detail as they may be able to share more under your NDA agreement etc.

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